4P1L DHT Preamp Siberian (Gen3) finished!

Introduction

Building a new version of the venerable 4P1L “Siberian” was very encouraging. This belated project finally came to life after some recent work on a new set of power supplies. So why 4P1L again? I always found the 4P1L sound to be unique. Great detail, overall tone and fantastic treble. What it makes it well suited for pre-amplifiers is not just its linearity (probably being the most linear valve out there) but the fact that it has a low anode resistance and current capability to ensure any challenging load can be handled effectively without any sound degradation. This can be heard particularly on the treble where the input capacitance of the amplifier is more evident and it is translated into treble loss. Other DHTs like 26, 01A, 30sp can only handle a few milliamperes of anode current and is not enough to charge and discharge the parasitic capacitance at high frequencies. More importantly, the 4P1L has filaments which aren’t demanding. This is a unique feature amongst DHTs that is rare and very useful. Having low-current filaments that can be either configured at 325mA or 650mA, low grid voltages and high transconductance in a valve is very useful. This mean that filament bias can be easily implemented without burning unnecessary power by swinging many volts to perform the desired level of amplification.

Continue reading “4P1L DHT Preamp Siberian (Gen3) finished!”

Fixed bias regulator

Testing the Rod Coleman Fixed Regulator

As part of my 300B SE project design, I looked into various fixed bias arrangements and regulators. Rod Coleman has developed another fantastic circuit after the success of his DHT filament regulator which is now the preferred filament supply kit within the DIY audio community. After many years of refining the DC filament regulator, Rod came up with a clever design for fixed bias using the same concept: a gyrator and a temperature-compensated CCS. Instead of feeding a current through the DHT filaments, in this case the current is used to generate a clean bias voltage across a “bias resistor”. The bias resistor is bypassed by a capacitor as the high impedance loop formed by the regulator and the bias resistor is sensitive to pick up HF noise which could be amplified by our system.

The kit is of the same quality you would expect from Rod’s boards and very easy to build. It takes less than an hour to build the boards:

Continue reading “Fixed bias regulator”

814 SE A2 Amplifier

Goodbye 4-65a SE, at least for now

After enjoying the 4-65a SE amplifier for many months, I couldn’t resist myself from upgrading the output stage to the 814s. I just needed changing sockets and filament raw supply transformers to fit the requirements of this lovely transmitting valve. Needless to say, my recent tests on 814s were very encouraging. The 814 seemed to perform much better than the 4-65a in delivering 10W of class A2 sound at half the distortion levels. This to me, was only worth trying.

Continue reading “814 SE A2 Amplifier”

Upgrading the DHT filament regulators

I upgraded the DHT filament regulators to version 4. Rod has released a new kit which introduces temperature compensation for high current filaments. This is a key feature in my 4-65a design and I shall explain why:

Continue reading “Upgrading the DHT filament regulators”

4-65a SE Amplifier: testing filament regulators

The Rod Coleman Filament Regulators were already tested in the New Year. It seems a long time indeed. Here is a selection of pictures after fitting the regulators in their heat-sinks and doing a final test before assembly:

4-65a

Testing the 4-65a filament regulators

4-65a filaments are lovely

46 filament bias and the regulator

46 Driver regulator

26 DHT Preamp Gen2 by Rui Lourenço

Rui's 26 DHT preamp in operation — Rui’s 26 DHT preamp in operation

Here is a great post by Rui Lourenço who finished a sublime incarnation of the 26 DHT preamp Gen2. I hope you find this post as inspiring as delightful it is for me to see someone taking my 26 DHT preamp version to the next level of perfection. I think Rui’s pictures will speak for themselves showing the great craftsman skills and amount of effort and dedication put into this art work.

My Type 26 Tube Preamplifier adventure – by Rui Lourenço (Portugal)

I’ve started my interest in diy audio about 2 decades ago, basically at that time because I had no means of buying some of the fantastic equipment’s I saw in several Audio Shows, also because the bug was there, and some of my friends were doing it. Today, fortunately I have the means, but the bug was kept and personally I believe that good implemented diy projects can most of the times be several notches above commercial products, or otherwise you would have to spend some important thousands of Euros to acquire them at a similar performance level. You all agree that the personal filling of achievement vs your friends drop jaws when looking to some of the wonderful projects we find everywhere, is also very good.

Continue reading “26 DHT Preamp Gen2 by Rui Lourenço”

46 DHT driver final tests

Having built the 4P1L filament bias driver stage in a breadboard, I now have the sufficient voltage swing to drive the 46 to maximum sweep. In my 4-65a SE amp, a maximum of 200Vpp is required to drive the amp into class A2.

The following tests conditions were used:

4P1L first stage:
- DN2540 gyrator in mu follower output
- 220nF/450V Capacitor coupled into 46 driver
- Filament bias: 15 ohms, Vgk=-10V
- Vsupply=355V and Va0=210V
- Output set to about 30-32Vpp to drive 46 at 200Vpp
46 driver stage:
- IXYS 01N100 gyrator in mu follower output
- Load impedance is 100K (Pete Millett’s interface)
- Filament bias: 10 ohm / 100W Vgk=-17V
- Vsupply=355V and Va0=204-208V
- Output set to 200Vpp

I tested 28 valves. Just a few of my lot are NOS. The average THD was about 0.4-0.5% but a good selection of 8 valves (mainly Sylvania NOS) provided a consistent 0.18% THD:

Happy now with the initial tests and selection of 46 pairs for the amplifier, I can now continue with the build…

4-65a SE Amp: refining the 46 driver

I did some tests today and looked at minimising distortion of this 46 driver in filament bias and found that Va=230V (instead of 184V) to provide best performance:Filament bias resistor array is now laid out horizontally to improve the dissipation of heat.

Here is the performance (0.05% at 17Vrms) at maximum drive input from my audio test set:

4-65a SE Amp: testing the 46 driver

46 driver breadboarded. The mu-follower gyrator, the filament bias resistor array and the nice teflon UX5 socket from Jakeband. The filament bias resistor array is formed by 4 10Ω 20W dale wirewound resistors. These get very hot so probably need to think an alternative layout or further resistors in parallel:The performance is very good. I just picked up a random 46 from my stock and biased it at 204V (which is the operating point in my design) achieving less than 0.05% at 10Vrms. Need to re-run this test to see how will perform at 70Vrms:

Using my spice model created from a good 46 valve, THD should be around 0.15% at 200Vpp with a 100K load and performance is great to loads down to 100 ohms. Clearly the load in A2 will change from high impedance to some kΩ so this driver should maintain outstanding linearity all the way through:

4-65a SE Amp: filament regulators

Finished the 4-65a filament regulators. Filament noise is only 1.5 mVrms at full load (3.5A):